PhD defence I. (Ioannis) Ntafoulis

Brief summary:

Glioblastoma is the most aggressive and lethal among all brain tumors. Despite the efforts to improve patient’s survival, introducing effective treatments remains an arduous journey as reflected in the negative outcome of most clinical trials the past 30 years. Therefore, there is urgent need for new therapeutic options that will drastically improve the treatment of this dreadful disease. In this thesis, we emphasize the necessity of bridging the gap between preclinical research findings and successful clinical translation. Therefore, we developed an in vitro drug screening platform based on patient-derived glioblastoma cells and applied a drug repurposing approach to identify promising agents for this disease with the ability to cross the BBB. With respect to the latter, we validated these findings in different orthotopic PDX models of glioblastoma that were first characterized in terms of BBB permeability and expression of efflux pumps. Below, we summarize the findings presented in this thesis.